Physics-Constrained Neural Network for Design and Feature-Based Optimization of Weave Architectures
This work addresses the optimization of woven fabrics for industries like aerospace and automotive, though it is incremental as it builds on existing neural network methods with physics constraints.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting mechanical properties of weave architectures and inversely designing patterns for target properties, showing that a Physics-Constrained Neural Network (PCNN) achieves higher accuracy than baselines in predicting weave architectures for desired modulus values.
Woven fabrics play an essential role in everyday textiles for clothing/sportswear, water filtration, and retaining walls, to reinforcements in stiff composites for lightweight structures like aerospace, sporting, automotive, and marine industries. Several possible combinations of weave patterns and material choices, which comprise weave architecture, present a challenging question about how they could influence the physical and mechanical properties of woven fabrics and reinforced structures. In this paper, we present a novel Physics-Constrained Neural Network (PCNN) to predict the mechanical properties like the modulus of weave architectures and the inverse problem of predicting pattern/material sequence for a design/target modulus value. The inverse problem is particularly challenging as it usually requires many iterations to find the appropriate architecture using traditional optimization approaches. We show that the proposed PCNN can effectively predict weave architecture for the desired modulus with higher accuracy than several baseline models considered. We present a feature-based optimization strategy to improve the predictions using features in the Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) space. We combine PCNN with this feature-based optimization to discover near-optimal weave architectures to facilitate the initial design of weave architecture. The proposed frameworks will primarily enable the woven composite analysis and optimization process, and be a starting point to introduce Knowledge-guided Neural Networks into the complex structural analysis.